2003 · 5 talks
Lecture Notes Archive, 2003
The first year of SkillSwap did something the later years mostly stopped doing: it published the speaker’s notes. Five sets survive. They are 2003 PowerPoint files and a zip, and they are served here from the same addresses they were downloaded from at the time, because that is where the links to them still point.
They are worth keeping for what they show rather than for practical use. This is what teaching web design looked like the year CSS layout was still an argument: a talk called CSS Based Design, a talk on designing for accessibility, and a session on search engine promotion subtitled “no tricks, just common sense and elbow grease”.
The Talks
| Date | Talk | Speaker | Handout |
|---|---|---|---|
| 31 March 2003 | Design for Accessibility | Andy Budd | Download notes (PowerPoint, 879 KB) · PDF version |
| 19 May 2003 | CSS Based Design | Jeremy Keith | Five PowerPoint shows, listed separately below |
| 28 July 2003 | PHP, Objects and Patterns | Matt Zandstra | Notes published online at the time |
| 1 September 2003 | Search Engine Promotion: No Tricks, Just Common Sense and Elbow Grease | Rosie Freshwater | Download notes (PowerPoint show, 292 KB) |
| 17 November 2003 | Information Architecture | Caroline White | Download notes (PowerPoint, 104 KB) |
The CSS Based Design Slide Set
The May 2003 talk did not ship one deck but five, one per subject, and they are listed individually here rather than bundled. Together they are a complete introduction to CSS layout as it was taught the year the argument was still live.
Other Recovered Files
The original index itemised only the five above. Further handouts were published but never listed, and those have been recovered too — a Photoshop session, a Mac OS X session, a two-part talk on the business of freelancing, and a self-contained set of DOM scripting examples that still runs in a browser.
All of them are on the recovered files page, with formats and sizes.
What Each of the Five Talks Was About
Design for Accessibility, March 2003, is the earliest and the largest handout at 879 KB. In 2003 accessible markup was an argument rather than a default, and a talk making the case had to make it from first principles: why structure matters independently of appearance, what a screen reader actually does with a page, why a layout built from tables cannot be linearised. Most of what it argues for is now simply how the platform works, which is the clearest measure of how much ground was covered in the years afterwards.
CSS Based Design, May 2003, shipped as five separate slide sets rather than one — an overview, the box model, positioning, typography and application. Splitting a single talk into five decks by subject is unusual and tells you how contested the material was: each of those five is a place where practitioners genuinely disagreed about how layout should be done.
PHP, Objects and Patterns, July 2003, is the one whose notes were published online rather than as a file, and consequently the one that has not survived as a download. The subject dates it precisely. Object orientation in PHP was new enough in 2003 to need a talk, and design patterns were still arriving in the language from elsewhere.
Search Engine Promotion, September 2003, carries the subtitle "no tricks, just common sense and elbow grease", which is a position statement rather than a description. It is a 292 KB slide show, and the subtitle is the most interesting thing about its inclusion: a room of practitioners in 2003 apparently needed telling that the honest approach was the workable one.
Information Architecture, November 2003, closes the year at 104 KB, the smallest of the set. The subject was newer as a named discipline then than it is now, and a talk introducing it to a room of web builders sits naturally alongside the others: all five are about how to organise work rather than about a tool.
Why the Files Are Served Rather Than Described
A summary of a 2003 handout would be more readable than the handout, and it would also be a paraphrase of somebody else’s work written by somebody who was not there. The files are the primary source, they were published at these addresses by the site itself, and they are served unchanged.
Unchanged is meant literally. Nothing here has been converted to a modern format, re-saved, re-compressed or cleaned up. A 2003 PowerPoint file opens in current software with some layout drift, and that drift is part of what the file now shows. Converting it would produce a tidier document and destroy the only evidence of how it was actually made.
The one exception is packaging rather than content. The CSS Based Design talk originally shipped as a single archive containing its five decks; the decks are now listed and served individually so that each can be linked and opened on its own. The files inside are untouched.
What the 2003 Series Tells You About the Rest
Five talks in one year, all in Brighton, all publishing their notes. Compared with what came later the differences are instructive.
These sessions expected to leave a record. Every one of the five has a handout, which means somebody decided the material should outlast the evening. The Brighton run from 2008 onwards published no slides at all — what survives of those talks is a title, the speaker’s own abstract, and a recording in a minority of cases. Neither approach is obviously right, but the earlier one is why anything from 2003 can be read today.
They were also single-speaker sessions rather than two-talk bills. One name per date, one subject worked through. The pairing that later became the format had not appeared yet, and the shift towards it tracks the shift away from prepared teaching material and towards people describing their current work.
And they were monthly-ish across a single year rather than sustained for a decade. Whatever the 2003 series was, it was not yet the habit that the later run became, which is visible in the record as a whole: the series pauses, changes shape, and comes back.
Where the Attribution Comes From
Every speaker and date on this page is taken from the original presentation index, which listed each talk with its author and the date it was given. That index is the reason these five can be attributed at all, and it is why the later handouts on the recovered files page cannot: they were published without being listed.
One name on this page recurs elsewhere in the archive. The person who gave the May 2003 talk on CSS-based design is among the referring sources that still link to the Brighton events years later, which is a small illustration of how tight the circle was: the people speaking in 2003 were the same people writing about the series in 2011.
Where a talk’s notes were published online rather than as a downloadable file, that is recorded as such rather than left blank. One of the five is in that position, and its notes have not survived.
What 2003 Looked Like
Some context, because the subjects only make sense against what the web was at the time.
Layout was unsettled. Building a page with CSS rather than nested tables was a position rather than a default, browsers implemented the box model inconsistently enough that positioning was genuinely difficult, and a talk splitting the subject into five separate decks was a reasonable response to how much there was to disagree about.
Accessibility was similarly contested. The argument that markup should describe structure independently of appearance had to be made from first principles, to people who had spent years achieving layouts by any means available. Most of what that talk argued for is now built into the platform, which is the clearest measure of how much moved in the years afterwards.
And the surrounding disciplines were newer as names than as practices. Information architecture was recent enough to need an introduction; search engine work was disreputable enough that a talk had to announce in its subtitle that it was not about tricks. Read together, the five talks are a snapshot of a trade working out what its own component parts were.
The File Formats as Evidence
The formats themselves date the material as precisely as the content does, and they are worth reading as part of the record.
PowerPoint in two variants — an editable .ppt and a .pps set to open straight into a slideshow — tells you that these files were expected to be emailed to people who might not have the application configured, and that someone thought about which version to publish. A zipped bundle of five separate shows tells you a single talk had five distinct parts. A PDF alongside a PowerPoint tells you somebody wanted the notes readable by anybody, which in 2003 was not a safe assumption about a presentation file.
What is absent is equally informative. No video, no audio, no HTML slide decks. Recording a talk in 2003 meant equipment somebody had to own, and web-based presentation formats did not exist in usable form, so the notes were the only realistic artefact. The Brighton run twenty years later recorded audio and published no slides at all, which is the same decision made under different constraints.
One Absence Worth Noting
The 2003 series published notes for five talks and there is no reason to think it held only five. What survives is what the presentation index happened to list, and an index is a filing decision rather than a complete account.
So read this page as five talks that were documented rather than as the year in full. That distinction runs through the whole archive, and it is the single most useful caveat to carry into any of it.